The freaks roll call: live art and the Arts Council 1968-1973

The Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) has been acknowledged, and credits itself as being, the enabling engine for Fringe Theatre and Live Art, which coalesced in the late 1960s and flourished during the 1970s. Even in its Dickensian-sounding 1976 annual report The Arts in Hard Times, Deputy Secretary General Richard Pulford could proudly declare that Fringe and Experimental Drama had been an area of exceptional growth, with subsidy rising from £223,000 in the previous year to just under £500,000. Taking into account the money spent by the affiliated Regional Arts Associations (RAA) that year the Arts Council had spent £1.5 million on a total of one hundred and six non-building-based companies.1 1In case the reader missed the full impact of this largesse, Pulford's report pointed out that such activity had scarcely existed seven years previously.2 2Yet the Arts Council's decision to fund Live Art – or Performance Art as it was frequently called at the time – was to be fraught with problems over definition, policy confusions and at times open resistance. This article will attempt to outline how policy slowly evolved during a period when definitions of what constituted performance were being completely redefined.